Drupal And WordPress Founders Share The Same Stage

Here is something you don’t get to see all the time. WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg and Drupal founder Dries Buytaert shared the same stage at an event called Schipulcon. While catering to the web marketing crowd, the event also has a short but concise mission statement:

To grow community champions that make the world a better place through extraordinary thinking, smart technology and cross-industry creativity.

Schipulcon took place in Houston, Texas which is the hometown of Matt Mullenweg. While some expected the two founders to duke it out, according to some in the audience, it looked more like a bromance.

Dries Buytaert and Matt Mullenweg at SchipulCon 2011 by Ed Schipul

Video for this session if not currently available but the folks who ran the event have said that the video will be published soon. However, there were a couple of notable quotes that were shared over twitter. Here is just a sampling.

kamichat
Wordpress founder @photomatt says the next gen for Wordpess is more social and mobile. #schipulcon – via

Beccamus
Cool! Some of the best tech & creative opportunities developed in #Houston like wordpress by @photomatt #schipulcon – via

Janerri
Though biased, I’m enjoying the contrast & comparison of @Drupal @WordPress It’s friendly now, how long will that last? #schipulcon – via

What I never see mentioned these days is the what I recall as the main point of contention between WordPress and Drupal: how the administration interface was handled:
* WordPress: separate UI for administration.
* Drupal: nearly identical UI for readers and administrators.
This turned out to be a lot more important than people realized at the time.

Having used Drupal & WordPress back in 2005/2006, at the time, it was not at all clear which platform was superior. Frankly, at the time, Drupal really seemed like the way to go.

There is one other technical detail which may have put WordPress ahead in terms of installed users: schema. The WordPress schema allows very easy updating. I can’t speak about the Drupal schema directly, but I can say that Drupal upgrades (for me, back in the day) were tricky enough that I ended up not updating Drupal for one site.

Upgrade difficulty is why I no longer run Mediawiki. It might be trivial now, back then it was a major PITA for an inexperienced user.